Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
SEPTEMBER 15, 2010
– Diary entry –
I
am writing from somewhere in Pennsylvania. Southwest
corner. A motel off the highway. Our room overlooks the
parking lot, and if I peek out from behind the stiff beige
curtains, I can see people milling about under the
fluorescent lights. It’s the kind of place where people mill
about. I have the emotional bends again. Too much has
happened, and so fast, and now I am in southwest
Pennsylvania, and my husband is enjoying a defiant sleep
amid the little packets of chips and candies he bought from
the vending machine down the hall. Dinner. He is angry at
me for not being a good sport. I thought I was putting up a
convincing front – hurray, a new adventure! – but I guess
not.
Now that I look back, it was like we were waiting for
something to happen. Like Nick and I were sitting under a
giant soundproof, windproof jar, and then the jar fell over
and – there was something to do.
Two weeks ago, we are in our usual unemployed state:
partly dressed, thick with boredom, getting ready to eat a
silent breakfast that we’ll stretch over the reading of the
newspaper in its entirety. We even read the auto

---

supplement now.
Nick’s cell phone rings at ten a.m., and I can tell by his
voice that it is Go. He sounds springy, boyish, the way he
always does when he talks to her. The way he used to
sound with me.
He heads into the bedroom and shuts the door, leaving
me holding two freshly made eggs Benedicts quivering on
the plates. I place his on the table and sit opposite,
wondering if I should wait to eat. If it were me, I think, I would
come back out and tell him to eat, or else I’d raise a finger:
Just one minute
. I’d be aware of the other person, my
spouse, left in the kitchen with plates of eggs. I feel bad that
I was thinking that. Because soon I can hear worried
murmurs and upset exclamations and gentle reassurances
from behind the door, and I begin wondering if Go is having
some back-home boy troubles. Go has a lot of breakups.
Even the ones that she instigates require much
handholding and goo-gawing from Nick.
So I have my usual 
Poor Go
face on when Nick
emerges, the eggs hardened on the plate. I see him and
know this isn’t just a Go problem.
‘My mom,’ he starts, and sits down. ‘Shit. My mom has
cancer. Stage four, and it’s spread to the liver and bones.
Which is bad, which is …’
He puts his face in his hands, and I go over and put my
arms around him. When he looks up, he is dry-eyed. Calm.
I’ve never seen my husband cry.
‘It’s too much for Go, on top of my dad’s Alzheimer’s.’
‘Alzheimer’s? 
Alzheimer’s?
Since when?’
‘Well, a while. At first they thought it was some sort of
early dementia. But it’s more, it’s worse.’

---

I think, immediately, that there is something wrong with
us, perhaps unfixable, if my husband wouldn’t think to tell
me this. Sometimes I feel it’s his personal game, that he’s
in some sort of undeclared contest for impenetrability. ‘Why
didn’t you say anything to me?’
‘My dad isn’t someone I like to talk about that much.’
‘But still—’
‘Amy. Please.’ He has that look, like I am being
unreasonable, like he is so sure I am being unreasonable
that I wonder if I am.
‘But now. Go says with my mom, she’ll need chemo but
… she’ll be really, really sick. She’ll need help.’
‘Should we start looking for in-home care for her? A
nurse?’
‘She doesn’t have that kind of insurance.’
He stares at me, arms crossed, and I know what he is
daring: daring me to offer to pay, and we can’t pay,
because I’ve given my money to my parents.
‘Okay, then, babe,’ I say. ‘What do you want to do?’
We stand across from each other, a showdown, as if
we are in a fight and I haven’t been informed. I reach out to
touch him, and he just looks at my hand.
‘We have to move back.’ He glares at me, opening his
eyes wide. He flicks his fingers out as if he is trying to rid
himself of something sticky. ‘We’ll take a year and we’ll go
do the right thing. We have no jobs, we have no money,
there’s nothing holding us here. Even you have to admit
that.’
‘Even 
I
have to?’ As if I am already being resistant. I
feel a burst of anger that I swallow.
‘This is what we’re going to do. We are going to do the

---

right thing. We are going to help 
my
parents for once.’
Of course that’s what we have to do, and of course if
he had presented the problem to me like I wasn’t his
enemy, that’s what I would have said. But he came out of
the door already treating me like a problem that needed to
be dealt with. I was the bitter voice that needed to be
squelched.
My husband is the most loyal man on the planet until
he’s not. I’ve seen his eyes literally turn a shade darker
when he’s felt betrayed by a friend, even a dear longtime
friend, and then the friend is never mentioned again. He
looked at me then like I was an object to be jettisoned if
necessary. It actually chilled me, that look.
So it is decided that quickly, with that little of a debate: We
are leaving New York. We are going to Missouri. To a
house in Missouri by the river where we will live. It is surreal,
and I’m not one to misuse the word 
surreal
.
I know it will be okay. It’s just so far from what I
pictured. When I pictured my life. That’s not to say bad, just
… If you gave me a million guesses where life would take
me, I wouldn’t have guessed. I find that alarming.
The packing of the U-Haul is a mini-tragedy: Nick,
determined and guilty, his mouth a tight line, getting it done,
unwilling to look at me. The U-Haul sits for hours, blocking
traffic on our little street, blinking its hazard lights – danger,
danger, danger – as Nick goes up and down the stairs, a
one-man assembly line, carrying boxes of books, boxes of
kitchen supplies, chairs, side tables. We are bringing our
vintage sofa – our broad old chesterfield that Dad calls our
pet, we dote on it so much. It is to be the last thing we pack,

---

a sweaty, awkward two-person job. Getting the massive
thing down our stairs (